SportsTalk. GUEST COMMENTARY.

Hey, Cubs: Spend The Money!

Baseball Teams With The Highest Payrolls Are The Ones In The World Series

March 30, 1997|By Scott Turow. and Scott Turow is a Chicago-based attorney and author whose novels include "Presumed Innocent" and "Burden of Proof."

Spring. The crocuses nose through the earth and the hearts of Cubs fans double-clutch, first hope, then, after a glance at the roster, a familiar spasm of despair.

We all know the sad numbers: Fifty-two years without a National League pennant, no World Series title since 1908, never during the years the Cubs have inhabited Wrigley Field. This is the saddest group of schleppers in professional sports, the franchise about which it was once remarked, "Every team can have a bad century."

Like my father, from whom I inherited this malady, I've been a Cubs fan my whole life. But I'm going to be 48 years old this spring, not long after Opening Day, and something desperate is stirring in my breast: I want a winner. I know, I know, every fan wants a winner. I've watched "Damn Yankees" many times, the musical comedy based on Douglas Wallop's novel about a fan so desperate he sells his soul to the devil to become Joe Hardy, a wondrous player who converts the old Washington Senators into champions.

As a Cubs fan, I might make the same deal. But failing any appearance at my door of somebody smelling of sulphur, I'm considering other drastic alternatives.

Losing for the Cubs has become if not a religion, at least a romance. Cubs fans have developed a sick co-dependence with the team's ownership. We go to Wrigley Field, we root, we listen and watch the games on Tribune Co.'s media triumvirate --WGN-Ch. 9, WGN-AM and CLTV on cable--while the Cubs always, inevitably, lose. We feel noble with self-pity, while Tribune Co. enjoys a healthy profit and the belief that, at least, it has delivered what Cubs fans expect. We have got to break the cycle. It's time for Cubs fans to remind the Cubs' corporate ownership that baseball, while unquestionably a business, is also a sport: competitive to the core, full of the win-big, lose-big stuff that's at the heart of athletics.

We have faced the music and followed the players' example. We have to go on strike.

Am I kidding? Momentarily. After all, there's a kind of terrible beauty and truth in what we've been through together. As a Cubs fan, I feel a haughty contempt for the fair-weather types in places like Philadelphia and New York who have never developed an appreciation for losing. Sports is about many of the myths that pull us like a Lorelei call through life, and the Passion Play the Cubs have enacted for most of this century is surely one of the best of them: faith amid bad fortune; hope against hope. But it's not the only story sports can tell. There is also the Myth of Victory.

No one wins or loses in life as perfectly, as completely as one does in sports. That's just why many of us find sports so compelling. But think of the lessons Michael Jordan has taught this beleaguered, disbelieving city, as we share our silent union with him and enjoy, again and again, that instant touched by celestial grace when we are he, the ultimate, the very best there is. Why doesn't Tribune Co. feel we're entitled to just a little of that at Wrigley Field?

The moment of truth for me came last year when I pondered the payroll figures at the end of the 1996 season. The No. 1 payroll in baseball belonged to the New York Yankees, $61.5 million. Remember who won the World Series? No. 2, at $55.1 million, were the Baltimore Orioles. Remember who played the Yankees for the American League pennant? No. 3, at $53.4 million, were the Atlanta Braves. Recall who won the NL pennant and who faced the Yanks in the Series? No. 4 were the Cleveland Indians, another great team, who went to the Series in '95 and were in the playoffs again last year.

Then I got down to the Cubs at 16th, who had a payroll of $28.5 million and finished under .500. By now my pulse was racing and my heart was screaming. The eight teams that reached the playoffs all came from the top half of payrolls. Is there a correlation here, or what?

Nor, it turns out, was this a one-year anomaly. In 1995, the eight playoff teams came from the 12 highest payrolls. There has long been a tie between spending and winning--from 1986 to 1989, the teams with the five highest average payrolls (the Red Sox, Dodgers, Royals, Yankees and Mets) enjoyed, among them, two World Series titles, five division titles and three second-place finishes. But the correlation appears to have increased since the 1994 players' strike, as general managers have refined their spending habits, heaping their dollars on the so-called "franchise players" who have the ability to carry a team, to make winners out of losers.